The Kakapo: World’s Horniest Bird

The Kakapo is a flightless, nocturnal parrot with whiskers that can only be found on two remote and predator-free islands off of the South Island. And if this bird doesn’t sound strange enough, the Kakapo has an even more bizarre mating ritual. After spending days cleaning and building a bowl-like stage on the forest floor, the male Kakapo calls for a female by booming, which is a low frequency sort of growl produced by inflating a thoracic sac. The boom travels for miles through the forest and males have been known to boom for 8 hours a night! He also produces a few chirps and squeals, hoping to attract a mate to his carefully crafted love-nest.

The Kakapo was hunted to near extinction for food and feathers by the Maori and white settlers and was extremely vulnerable to introduced predators. Today, the Department of Conservation is doing its best to breed these rare birds in the Kakapo Recovery Program. But there is one small problem: There are only 90 known Kakapo in existence, making reproduction a bit difficult. In fact, male Kakapo get so desperate for a mate that they have been known to “attack” humans in an attempt to mate with something, anything!

As part of the breeding program, DOC created mechanical female Kakapo in the hopes that the males would “mate” with it and deposit sperm so that real Kakapo females could be artificially inseminated. So far, male Kakapo haven’t been desperate enough to “take advantage” of the remote-control birds. But give them a few more years….those mechanical females might start looking better and better!